Select the Best Online Coding Platform: A Practical Guide

Technical teams are the bedrock of some of the most successful and agile organizations today. They create synergy between the company’s vision and various internal processes, continually innovating, unlocking critical insights, and upskilling to maintain a competitive advantage.  

Yet, companies often err in attracting and onboarding talent with the right technical skills as hiring quality coders is tedious. Recruiters usually have an inefficient screening process, given their limited knowledge of the expansive technical universe. They either end up hiring a coder without testing their skills or design unreasonably challenging assessments, filtering out even the most deserving candidates. At times, they also impair their hiring by extending their process for months, resulting in losing out on onboarding the best talent.

Recruiting technical talent seems particularly challenging in today’s fast-paced market. But it is not impossible. It’s about refining the entire process by going beyond conventional means.

Which is the best tech hiring platform? 

Today’s market is replete with a myriad of online tech hiring platforms that enable swift and seamless technical hiring, offering numerous advantages. But, with many online coding assessment players in the market, the selection for the right tech hiring platform must be more precise.

Hence, your shortlisting process should depend on a player’s ability to offer ‘three pillars‘ that simplify and scale your assessment and hiring process to make informed decisions.

It includes:

Technical skills are extensive and ever-changing. Hence, when shortlisting a vendor providing a technical hiring platform, ascertain the range of programming languages and frameworks they provide for all significant coding job roles. The tech recruiting software should be diverse to cover every existing and new-age language, framework, technology, topics, and skills requirements. Also, assess their ability to provide accurate technical assessments for micro-skills and concepts within coding system and development. In many ways, this provides an accurate picture of a candidate’s all-around fit for a required position.

An eclectic mix of expertise and application-based questions is the future of candidate assessments and recruitment. They cumulatively offer a holistic overview of a programmer’s aptitude to take on a variety of existing and future coding tasks. Knowledge-based questions are your first filtration process that shortlists based on essential knowledge, concept, application, and analysis. Afterward, the selected few are assessed practically via application-based questions that provide a real sense of candidates’ ability by asking them to mirror real-world challenges. As candidates create codes from scratch, a stimulating attribute of the best recruitment software is swift auto-grading to eliminate bias and ensure evidence-based hiring decisions.

An efficient online coding platform is the third pillar that enables quality hiring at scale. Choose a vendor based on a dynamic platform that is comprehensive, user-friendly, and offers an easy-to-use interface for the candidate and the assessor alike. As a recruiter, you must be able to schedule tests, screen candidates, and roll out online interviews, seamlessly, with a clear oversight on progress and performance. Pick the top online coding platform based on provisions, such as customization, hands-on skill support, swift auto-evaluation, scalability, a suite of anti-cheating solutions, result validation and proficient tracking of the tech hiring funnel. The best coding platform should smoothly integrate and be location-agnostic for all. Consistency and support promptness throughout the platform’s usage is another critical way of assessing the best coding platform.

A substantial technical hiring platform fine-tunes your assessment and recruitment requirements by cumulating all the key features mentioned above. Hence, the absence of these features leads to an incomplete evaluation and hiring, consequently an irrelevant service provider.

We have assessed the industry’s top five online tech recruiting platforms in this blog. We deep-dived into their recruitment software and background to evaluate each vendor’s distinct offerings that can simplify and scale your hiring process. It includes their provision for role-based features, question library, API’s & integrations, performance metric, and much more.

The five best coding platform providers are:

• Mercer | Mettl
• HackerRank
• HackerEarth
• Codility
• Interview Mocha

Mercer | Mettl

Founded in 2010, Mercer | Mettl is a leading technology company that provides a sophisticated range of online assessment software, competency-based customized skill assessment tools, result analytics and proctoring services to a diverse set of clientele across industries and sectors. Mercer | Mettl has an undisputed reputation in building innovative yet straightforward solutions on the cloud, empowering global markets. It is the only Indian company to have been featured in Gartner’s Global Market Guide for Top Proctoring Vendors in the World. 

Mercer | Mettl’s automated online role-based assessment tests identify potential candidates, evaluate them on various skill sets and provide a comprehensive summary of their knowledge. Its rich repository of 100,000+ technical questions for 300+ skills helps comprehensively test a coder’s competency at every level. It offers highly-scalable, auto-graded simulators for freshers and an all-in-one coding platform for lateral hiring. A unique coding platform further allows candidates to write their test cases during the interview process to assess their real-world skills.

• Client Size – 4000+ clients across 90+ countries 
• Key features – customized assessments and reports; a library of 1,50,000 questions; question types, including a combination of application and knowledge-based assessment, case study simulators; provides more than 100 skills and framework support; data-driven evaluation methodology; and intuitive user interface
• Platform Services – For Freshers– Decoding a candidate’s coding aptitude and building efficient code, uncovers the candidate’s core technical concepts for a diverse set of technologies, validates coding proficiency in general programming languages, to ascertain real-world compatibility. For senior coders- state-of-the-art programming platforms, simulators across the Front-end, Back-end, Database, DevOps, Data Science and more, specially designed to assess experienced developers on real-world projects in familiar coding environments; comprehensive assessment of experienced hires for specific roles

HackerRank

Founded in 2012, HackerRank is a technical hiring platform for assessing developers’ skills. HackerRank devises role-specific technical assessments, invites candidates to take the assessment and reviews, scores, and ranks them. It provides online pre-employment assessments before the interview process.

• Client Size – 2,000+
• Key features – Evaluate developer skills, pinpoint high-quality candidates, ensure quick scores, question library 1500+ and provide up to 44 skills and framework support
• Platform Services – evaluation engine with a choice of custom, automated, or manual scoring, proctoring features, role-specific questions

HackerEarth

Founded in 2012, HackerEarth allows companies to effectively create skill-based assessments and screen candidates when hiring technical talent. Its test creation is based on job profiles wherein it evaluates candidates on various coding platforms, programming languages, shortlisting them based on cut-off scores.

• Client Size – 1,000+ 
• Key features – seamless integrations across major ATS providers, question library 15000+ and question type MCQ, provides 32 skills and framework support, standardized reporting
• Platform Services – Proctoring, evaluated insights, allows multiple users and admins, manual evaluation on simulators for various roles, standardized reports.

Codility

Founded in 2009, Codility is a tech hiring platform that helps tech recruiters and hiring managers to assess candidates through online coding tests. Its platform helps hiring teams evaluate the candidates’ skills at scale. Its take-home coding assessments are location-agnostic.

• Client Size – N/A
• Key features – Question library ~750, 23 skills and framework support, standardized reporting and automated activities
• Platform Services – evaluates the candidate’s ability to solve problems, takes feedback and communicates technical concepts

Interview Mocha

Founded in 2015, Interview Mocha provides pre-employment skills assessment solutions solving for recruitment and upskilling challenges. It provides ready-made skill tests and customizable assessments on coding, aptitude, IT, business and domain skills. They even offer proctoring features to ensure the integrity of the assessments. 

• Client Size – 1000+
• Key features – ready-made skills, enterprise assessment platform, ATS integrations, Web-Based, Cloud, SaaS, 
• Platform services – Online skill assessment testing, multi-competency assessments, online proctoring mechanism, employee skill testing, decisive reporting, hiring analytics, and recruitment testing tools

Now that we have discussed the most prominent industry players, you must assess your specific requirements. Here is an insightful checklist, detailing significant roles and the most sought-after features required by market leaders to solve their hiring problems.

Offerings for Major ‘Role Based Assessments’

Overall Competitive Comparison

What is technical hiring? Technical hiring involves finding qualified technical candidates for a specific role. It includes screening, assessessing and interviewing. And as mentioned, technical candidates are critical for leading corporations. But a well-envisaged tech hiring process is as critical as the teams for a thriving business. Hiring Managers cast a wide net when prospecting technical candidates. And, while they do get a large pool of talent, they often spend disproportionate time shortlisting the candidates for screening and interviewing. Don’t waste your precious time pursuing manual and outdated processes to verify, analyze and hire excellent candidates. Better tech hiring decisions can be made with the right tests and automated tools, along with the interview. You just have to invest in the best tech recruiting software.

The best tech recruiting software judges the candidate’s knowledge of tools, frameworks, libraries and the hands-on experience on the required skill or technology, making them a perfect fit. Hence, companies looking for a qualified team of developers for a variety of tech projects should look for sustainable hiring practices that align with a forward-looking business strategy.

The most significant filter in your recruitment process is a hands-on programming assessment test. Therefore, Mercer | Mettl’s automated online role-based assessment tests offer a simplified technical hiring platform. Each test identifies potential candidates, evaluates them on various skills set, and provides a comprehensive summary of their knowledge. It is in tandem with the company’s vision and expectations of a developer. 

We also provide various testing tools and test cases, such as question types, including application and knowledge-based questions, MCQs +  coding simulators, case study simulators, etc. You can recruit the best coder, whether through campus drives or resumes, within the stipulated timelines using a data-driven evaluation methodology, intuitive user interface, and customized reports.

In case you are looking for something specific, our team of experts builds customized assessments that can’t be found anywhere. These tailor-made pre-hiring assessments are an ideal filtration process to explore candidates’ desired skills set without bias, for IQ skills and coding skills. Tailored solutions, matching organizational objectives with features and applications, are offered at every level to assist you in hiring the ideal candidate.

Mercer | Mettl I/O

We bring you the first-of-its-kind, all-in-one online coding platform for interview in ‘Mercer | Mettl I/O.’ It helps in demystifying and improving your lateral hiring processes, both at a large and small scale. This unique coding tool assesses candidates’ preparedness to take on challenges by evaluating them on project-based, real-world tasks using various tools. In four easy steps, hiring managers can optimize the hiring process and evaluate candidates using data-driven insights.

This highly sophisticated and customizable tool with real-time, insightful reports and auto-evaluation of the code provides best-in-class integrated development environments (IDE), and programming tools to help evaluate a coder/developer/programmer’s proficiency levels. It caters to all major programming roles and supports the most diverse set of technologies. Mercer | Mettl I/O is exceptionally efficient in measuring the real ability of candidates.

A Repository of Technical Questions

The quality and coverage of our technical questions are unmatched as we cover a vast array of roles and skills. A rich repository of 100,000+ technical questions for 300+ skills helps test a coder’s competency at every level comprehensively. You can choose from a set of readily-available standardized tests from our vast library of programming assessments. With a ready-to-use, pre-build test set, instantaneously assessing a coder’s skill helps save time.

An Extensive List of Simulators

Mercer | Mettl offers an extensive list of simulators to evaluate a coder’s hands-on experience and the ability for the desired role. These simulators enable recruiters to give a real project to a coder from a specific domain of software development. They also evaluate their experience and ability to solve a problem in any desired programming language. These real-world challenges provide a real sense of a student or fresher’s project building abilities.

This comprehensive simulator environment is available for:

• Codelysis: Back-end Simulator

It evaluates candidates’ experience and ability to solve a problem in any desired programming language. 

• DBLysis: Database Simulator

It evaluates the candidates’ ability to write correct and optimized SQL queries. 

• FES: Front-end Simulator

It evaluates candidates’ capability to implement web designs and solve problems using front-end technologies. 

• R: Data Science Simulator

It evaluates candidates’ analytical and statistical acumen for data analytics roles.

• Code Project: Back-end+DB Simulator

It evaluates candidates’ ability to develop console-based applications. 

• JavaScript Suite Simulator

It evaluates candidates’ ability to develop front-end, back-end, and database applications using JavaScript.

These simulators are highly-scalable, auto-graded, and designed to test students’ and working professionals’ coding skills. Our simulators support all popular technologies and enable creating language-agnostic questions. A complete auto-graded evaluation report provides a detailed code journey with a plagiarism detector. 

Xathon: Hackathon Platform

The most efficient means to reach out and engage with sizable talent is through Xathon, a Hackathon platform when hiring a coder or developer from campuses. A holistically designed coding platform to conduct scalable online assessments. By conducting coding hackathons and case study competitions, companies can identify and hire problem solvers and best coders. This not only increases their onboarding rate but offers them the best minds with new ideas.

VidView: Coding Platform for Interview 

Allowing candidates to write their test cases during the interview process is another way of assessing their development skills. With a live coding analysis on the interview platform, the recruiter gets a real picture of the candidate’s abilities and accomplishments during the interview phase. This saves significant time for all concerned while ensuring that the company remains a step ahead in hiring the best talent.

Which is the best platform for competitive coding?

The best programming platform for competitive coding are: 

• Mercer | Mettl
• HackerRank
• HackerEarth
• Codility
• Interview Mocha

Which is the best coding platform for beginners?

The best coding platform for beginners are: 

• Mercer | Mettl
• HackerRank
• HackerEarth
• Codility
• Interview Mocha